Quote of the Day: Unfortunately Apt Edition

“Jourdanton police Chief Eric Kaiser said an employee at the Bullet Hole gun shop, 1112 Oak St., was cleaning a gun when it accidentally fired. The bullet went through a wall and into an adjacent building, hitting the victim in the eye.” – kens5.com

After intially reading this i got kind of scared there for a minute. There is a shooting range on the other side of San Antonio that i go to that is called the bullet hole. i went yesterday and almost went today, and kind of freaked when i saw this thinking it was the shooting range.

Note: Last month or so, the shooting range “the bullet hole” had a suicide at the range.Maybe its bad luck to name your gun business the bullet hole?

Something like this actually happened at the College Campus I attended. Except, it was a Campus Cop playing Quick Draw McGraw in the mirror and put a .357 round through several temporary buildings including the interior walls. Luckily, no one was hurt.

These “accidental discharge while cleaning” stories drive me crazy. Were they attempting to disassemble it to clean it? Because every time I hear that a gun went off while being cleaned I get this ridiculous image of my mind of a bunch of parts spread out on a table when suddenly the barrel goes BANG and jumps. That and some poor moron trying to force a cleaning rod past a live cartridge.

Where I guess we disagree is on the appropriate punishment. One-strike-you’re-out is my idea of an appropriate response. The negligence and stupidity and not-giving-a-fuck which goes into this kind of thing cannot be cured. No more guns is the answer.

Glocks, Ruger Mk IIIs, and far too many other pistols have an unfortunate problem where the dissassembly for cleaning and lubrication instructions are, effectively:

“Step 1, make sure the weapon is not loaded”
“Step 2, pull the trigger”

Which means if knucklehead didn’t check the chamber first, BOOM.

That is why, eg, IIRC, the S&W M&P pistol line technically can be field-stripped by pulling the trigger to lower the sear, the instructions say to lock the slide back and use a tool to push the sear down…

The Springfield Armory XDm line can be stripped without pulling the trigger and without any tools, which is a selling point for me for precisely this reason. Yes, you should always, always double and triple check that the weapon is clear, but mistakes happen and I like the fact that I can skip that potentially problematic step.